Everyone wants to write a book

It constantly amazes me how many people want to write a book and how many are now looking at the ebook option.

Some are writers who want control and want to do it themselves. Some have never tried publishing and, based on what their writer friends tell them, they never want to. Others are not writers but experts in their fields who could find no crack in the high forbidding wall of traditional publishing.

It’s a sad thing if everyone who has mastered an art or craft and wants to write about it for the benefit of others – can’t even get to do so. They don’t have to be good writers. They just have to know their field, which most of them really do know very well.

Some just want to write their life stories, the history of the turbulence they lived through. Yes, they are not writers. Does that make their stories less valid?

Some people are always complaining that there is too much crap out there especially in ebooks and self-publishing. What does that mean? By whose definition is one book less valid than another?

Who decides on quality anyway? Publishers liked to think they did, that a writer is anointed as a writer of quality by being published by the best imprints.

For me, validation, if you even need it, comes from readers.

And I have been lucky enough to have it in plenty. So many people told me they keep my book Mantramala by their bedside. Others showed me they carried it in their bags or gave it as gifts.

Was that more important than seeing my book on the front shelves of a book shop? I saw that too, but yes, it was. That was real validation.

And it does not need anyone’s stamp of approval.

So, I see a real hunger and its everywhere.

Can I really do it myself? How do I do it?

Things have really changed. One new author told me she was offered a package from a publisher and she refused it, indignantly. They offered me only ten percent, she said, how foolish do they think I am?

There is no question in my mind – almost everyone wants to write a book and now everyone can and that’s what is right about this world.